Philip José Farmer

Where this area had been beautiful with its many trees and bright grass and the colored blooms of the vines that covered the trees, it was now like a battlefield. It had been necessary to create ugliness to build a beautiful boat.

His thinking wasn’t logical. But whatever the philosophers claimed, the main use of logic was to justify your emotions.

Nightmare in paradise. Or what could have been paradise if so many human beings did not insist on make in a hell of it.

Burton sighed, laughed loudly, and said, “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.” Another fairy tale to give men hope. The old religions have been discredited — although some refuse to face even that fact — so new ones must be invented.”

Of course, I’m only indulging in mankind’s vice of trying to make a symbol out of coincidence.

He was stiff and sometimes a little strange, which was what you’d expect from an engineer, but he had a moral backbone as inflexible as a fossilized dinosaur’s.

I ought to arrest your assertions for vagrancy. They certainly are without any visible support.

But we may not be able to climb high enough. Look at those mountains. They go straight up, smooth as a politician denying he ever made a campaign promise.

It was not that he was unintelligent. It was just that he was not emotionally able to comprehend democracy.

“Would you like to talk?”

“When I dream, I am talking.”

“But to yourself.”

“Who knows me better?” He laughed softly.

“And who can deceive you better,” she said a little tartly.